Eskippakithiki, The Last Indian Town in Kentucky - The Filson ...

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356 The Filson Club History .Quarterly [ Vol. 6 cans in the northwest; the Siouans in the west, in the Ohio and Great Lakes valleys, and along the Atlantic slopes; the Muskhogeans and Yuchians in the south; and the Iroquoians in the valleys of the St. Lawrence, Hudson, and Susquehanna rivers, and in the Carolina hills. The eastern Algonquian tribes best known to us were the Algonkins, Pequots, Narragansetts, Mohicans, Delawares, and Powhatans, listed from north to south along the seaboard. They had a great effect on our early history, and from them has been derived the notion most of us have of the Indian-bloodthirsty, and low in culture--a nomad hunter whose squaw does the hard work. In the west their best known tribes were the Shawnees, Miamis, Ottawas, Illinois, Chippeways, Cheyennes, and Crees. These were like their eastern kin in culture. From Algonquian tongues have come our words squaw, papoose, wigwam, caucus, tomahawk, moose, raccoon, opossum, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Wyoming, Mississippi, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and many others. The best known Iroquoian tribes were those of the Five Nations: Mohawks or Iroquois, Cayugas, Oneidas, Onondagas, and Seneeas, who were also called, collectively, the Iroquois, the Senecas, the Confederacy, and the League, whose homes were in New York; the Tuscaroras of North Carolina, who moved north in the first half of the eighteenth century and joined the League, causing it to be called thereafter the Six Nations; the Conestogas of Maryland and Pennsylvania; the Hurons who, driven from the north of Lake Erie by the Five Nations, became known to our pioneers as Wyandots; and lastly the Cherokees, whose language and customs were so unlike the other Iroquoians that they are seldom thought of as the same. The Iroquoians have given us the words Erie, Huron, Niagara, Quebec, Ontario, Ohio, Tennessee, and Kentucky. The eastern Siouans are but slightly known to the casual reader. Their most noted tribe was the Catawba which, driven out of the upper Ohio Valley by the Iroquois, about 1650, sett!ed in the Carolinas. The Siouans were sedentary, great corn-growers, more civilized than the Indians surrounding them, and were the builders of the great earthworks and hill-forts of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, the Dakotas, Iowa, Missouri, West Virginia, Kentueky, Virginia, and Georgia. Their modern descendants, Sioux, Omahas, Osages, Dakotas, Mandans, etc., are better known to us.
Vol. 6 ] The Filson Club History Quarterly 357 Tepee, Paducah, Omaha, Chatteroi, Kanawha, Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, and Dakota arc Siouan words. Among the Muskhogeans were the Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, Seminoles, Natchez, and Yemasees, who lived in the eastern Gulf States, in Tennessee, and in western Kentucky. They influenced white settlement greatly and were a valiant, cultured, and able people. Many northern tribes fled to them for protection from the savage Iroquois, who never attacked them successfully. They have given us many geographic terms, Appalachian, Caloosahatchie, Tuscaloosa, Tombigbee, Natchez, Yazoo, Alabama, and Oklahoma being some of them. THE SRAWNEES: Of all these ancient peoples, for purposes of this story, our greatest interest is in the Shawnees who had, perhaps, the most eventful history of any tribe in the United States, a section of which, the Picts or Piquas, built the village of Eskippakithiki in the southeastern corner of the present Clark County, Kentucky. Eskippaki is a Shawnee word meaning "blue-lick," as a salt-sulphur spring was called; and (th)iki is a locative ending which can be translated "place," the whole meaning "blue-lickplace." The word Shawnee means "southerner" in the Algonquian tongues; and, historically, it became applied to those Indians who, breaking away from the Outagami or Sauk Nation in Wisconsin, and moving southward across the Ohio, took the advance of the Algonquian invasion in that direction, thereby acquiring their new name. This southward movement of the Shawnees was the last part of a general movement of the Algonquians that began-according to the ralam Olum, the birchbark historic record of the Delawares, a closely related Algonquian tribe--shortly before Leif Ericsson landed in Vinland. Before that time all of the Algonquians seem to have lived north of the Great Lakes. When the Shawnees started south is not certainly known. However, it was not long before the French came to Illinois, for the Jesuit Relations of 1648 shows that some of them were with the Mascoutins in Illinois at that time; but before 1669 they had fled southward, trying to escape the fierce war parties of the Five Nations. The Jesuit Relations of 1670 says that they then lived some distance to the southeast of Illinois, which puts them in Kentueky or Tennessee.
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